China's One Belt, One Road: Pakistan's Cautionary Tale

Back in 2015, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) section of China's One Belt, One Road (OBOR) Initiative was expected to bring economic development and jobs to Pakistan and also provide substantial benefits to China. The new deep water port at Gwadar, Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea would enable China to transport oil from the Middle East up through Pakistan to western China rather than across the Indian Ocean and through the congested Malacca Straight between Indonesia and Malaysia to the South China Sea. By encircling India, the CPEC offered a way to balance or neutralize democratic India's influence in the region, but the CPEC also involved China in India's Kashmir border dispute with Pakistan high in the Himalaya Mountains. Shots fired on the border in Septemebr, 2020, violated an Indo-Chinese agreement. Pakistan found the terms of the CPEC less than transparent and a debt burden Beijing was unwilling to renegotiate. The Chinese support Pakistan expected for its border dispute with India failed to materialize. In fact, in September, 2017, China and India signed an anti-terrorist declaration that criticized Pakistan for shielding terrorist groups. The US even floats the notion that China might be an ally willing to help persuade Pakistan to pressure its Taliban friends to help stabilize neighboring Afghanistan. The bottom line is: Pakistan's deteriorating economy, made worse by the coronavirus, finds 18 million employees out of work. China, which expects repayment for the CPEC, has no need for Pakistan's textile exports. CPEC construction jobs failed to satisfy Pakistan's need for the education, technical training and scientific research necessary for modern employment, such as monitoring and correcting Pakistan's poor air quality. Finally, the CPEC involves atheistic China with a Muslim country, when China is trying to eliminate the Uighur Muslim culture in Kashgar, home of the Id Kah Mosque, and to control up to one million Uighurs in so-called re-education camps. At the same time, Pakistan's Hindu minority, already discriminated against in better economic times, is converting to Islam just to receive assistance from the government and charities.

Girl Power?

Lured by the romance of joining the "jihadi girl power subculture," young tech-savvy Western women are developing contacts with ISIS terrorists, just like the Latin Queens who have been drawn to the gang of Latin Kings. The question is: Are women who join terrorist groups and gangs exhibiting girl power or their willingness to become tools of male power? Are terrorist groups grooming women to use their quick reflexes to detonate car bombs, their devotion to become suicide bombers, or their feminine wiles to return to their home countries to attack targets determined by men?

      Female Kurdish soldiers also have taken up arms against ISIS. Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned Marxist leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that has long fought a war for independence from Turkey, recognized how his support for gender equality would help enlist women who understand ISIS's intention to restrict the rights of women.

 Girl power is seen in other forms by the following women:

• Malala Yousafzai The Pakistani girl who recovered from being shot in the head by the Taliban and went onto win a Nobel Peace Prize for supporting the education of women throughout the world  In 2015, Time magazine named her one of the "100 Most Influential People." Her story is told in the book, I Am Malala.
• Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe This nun from the order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, recognized as one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" in 2014,  ministers to the girls abducted and raped by soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Army in Southern Sudan and Uganda. At the Saint Monica Vocational School in Gulu, Uganda, these girls learn to grow their own food, make their own clothes, tenderly care for their children, and sew the purses and other items they sell to support themselves and their families. Profits from the book, Sewing Hope, the story of Sister Rosemary, support her work.

Also, consider the three women that National Geographic has identified as "Emerging Explorers."

• Mantza Morales Casanova When this Mexican woman saw children harming animals and plants, she decided to form Humanity United to Nature in Harmony for Beauty (HUNAB), an organization determined: 1) to put education about the environment into schools, 2) create Ceiba Petandra Park, a free area where 64,000 children can have an interactive learning experience about climate change, wetland conservation, wildlife protection, and pollution, and 3) to provide the education that children need to become environmental leaders who change the world.
• Shivani Bhalla Determined to save Kenya's lions, she founded: 1) Lions Kids Camp, where children often see lions in the wild for the first time, and 2) Ewaso Lions, a community outreach program designed to give tribal warriors, women, and children reasons to embrace conservation and to respect and coexist with lions.
• Shabana Basij-Rasikh At a risk to her own life and theirs, her parents sent her to a school in Afghanistan, where she excelled and went on to earn a degree from Middlebury College in the United States. To prepare other girls to attend universities abroad, she co-founded the School of Leadership, Afghanistan, a boarding school for girls. She has said, "The most effective antidote to the Taliban is to create the best educated leadership generation in Afghanistan's history. Our girls of today - the women of tomorrow - will make it happen."